If you were ever lucky enough to sit down for a meal with Les and Milly Paris, chances are you would have been seated with your back to a big Don Peebles canvas and board work with a Don Driver framed sack next to it. Over the table on the opposite wall next to a painting by Colin McCahon with a fat cream cloud hovering above a green hill would have been Don Binney’s Vanishing Wellington bird.
The vanishing bird was the Stitchbird and the small building below it a sub station on the road that winds up from Aro Street.
It’s not a road we take very often so when we saw the A+O video of Hamish Coney talking about the painting we went up to get a photo of the sub station. Gone. Probably vanished years back but there you go.
It’s the same story as the other painting by Binney that was also hung in the Paris’s dining room for many years. That one was Old Wellington synagogue and was commissioned by the Parises to commemorate the old Beth El Synagogue on 222 the Terrace that was pulled down to make way fro the Wellington motorway.
You can See Hamish Coney and Ben Plumbly talking about the Les and Milly Paris collection and Vanishing Wellington bird here. OTN will be at the auction tonight to tweet the action from around 6.30 on. The coverage will appear on the right hand side of the blog.
